Anonymous on Professional Learning Communities in Utah

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Several schools in our school district (Washington County Utah) have started doing this kind of assessment and intervention with individual students. They've had such amazing results that the school district is passing a resolution today requiring all schools and teachers to participate. They call them Professional Learning Communities or PLC's.

From today's newspaper:

"The resolution in support of PLCs would require each educator in the district to participate in the PLC activities, part of a collaborative effort to achieve better results from students by continuously analyzing performance and intervening where necessary with individual students."
School board ponders new background checks
David DeMille • ddemille@thespectrum.com • Published: March 07. 2011 10:29AM

I am a huge fan of "Professional Learning Communities," which I think should probably be seen as an indigenous, American form of Japanese lesson study.

Richard DuFour invented "professional learning communities" at Adlai Stevenson High School in the 1980s, and the school has seen continuous improvement in student achievement since that time. Here's his website: allthingsplc.

The great charter schools use a variant of Richard DuFour's approach, too. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo cites DuFour in his book Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction which is essentially the companion volume to Doug Lemov's Teaching Like a Champion.

data in schools

“In education, data has traditionally been used for punitive purposes, not for improvement...”
March 7, 2011, 10:05 pm
Coming Together to Give Schools a Boost
By DAVID BORNSTEIN

Reading Bornstein's article over breakfast this morning, I had a revelation.

For years now, a number of us have pressed our school district to assess student learning and adjust instruction accordingly -- i.e., to use formative assessment. We've gotten nowhere, and I've tended to see the district as 'allergic' to measurement in general.

But in fact, my district owns cutting-edge software that tracks disciplinary actions. When a student is sent to the office, the principal can instantly pull up his entire computerized disciplinary record and read out loud all of the bad things the student has done going back for years. I don't know whether the current principal of the middle school actually does this, but his predecessor did. He would fire up his computer and take the student on a little trip down memory lane: all the bad memories, none of the good.

Of course, I doubt the district has used its computerized disciplinary records as a means to monitor improvements in student behavior. The district essentially never sets measurable goals of any kind.

But still.

We have cutting-edge software to track misbehavior and disciplinary actions.

We don't have cutting-edge software to track student learning.

do principals know who the best teachers are?

If principals and other administrators are doing their jobs, they already know who the best and worse teachers are. One year, Brookline administered one form of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in the fall to third graders and the state administered a different form of the same test in the spring. I calculated the mean gain score for each teacher and asked the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction to tell me which teachers would have the highest and lowest gain scores. She got the group of highest teachers exactly right and missed only one of the lowest. I would expect building-based administrators to do even better. More formal analysis confirms my experience (Murnane, 1975; Jacob and Lefgren, 2008).

Measurement Matters: Perspectives on Education Policy from an Economist and School Board Member (pdf file)
by Kevin Lang

testing

ok, I'm writing a blog post about a book sold on Amazon: Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.

hmmm

Interesting.